by Jordan Selous

There is a moment on a Wednesday when all the doors open. It’s usually a scramble: one that’s amusing to watch if you’re not part of it. People in all sorts of states emerge—a hastily flung-on gown, hair in a doek, faces half made-up, one shoe on and hobbling to the street. Often, you see people you’ll never see at any other time of the week. Sometimes there’s frantic, stress-taut yelling, families bickering at each other in a hurry.
This day, if you haven’t guessed by now, is the day where the filthiest parts of a household become exposed to the public. This is the day a growling truck eats our secrets. This day is bin day.
On this street, bins are stolen. The residents keep them behind gates until they hear a distant growl travelling up the road. This is when the floodgates open, when chaos ensues. A minute or so passes. The retreat begins, and separate lives go on their separate pathways once more.
Silent battles constantly take place. They’re often passive aggressive. After the fibre was fixed, my mother deliberately did not call the council to fix the pavement, just so that nobody would park outside our house. Two doors down, Mrs Soloman leaves notes on cars asking them not to park outside her home. She’s in a wheelchair, and they need the driveway. She hated the electric blue Beetle, but my aunt’s Mercedes? “You can park here whenever you like!” she said.
There is a pile of soil on the pavement outside my house. Sara’s eleven cats like to use it as their shitting ground. You can find them under your car, or milling in the street. Legally, one household can only have four felines. Does Sara care? No. Do we? Yes. I once thought somebody abandoned a wailing baby in our alleyway. Turns out it was just two cats trying to make babies.
At night, you would hear her voice crying out for Tigger, or Ginger, or whatever they were called. When she found them all, she would walk through the street, her burka flowing behind her, a trail of cats in her wake.
The Snowflake factory is a two-minute walk away, and occasionally the warm scent of fresh bread wafts its way over to us. At around one in the afternoon, then again at three, schoolchildren yell and laugh their way to the train. Some of them linger by the gate near us, and yell for
our tenant’s child. “Alina! Aliiiiiina!”
If I had a Rand for every time I’ve heard that name this year, I’d buy them a doorbell.
When golden hour paints the sky, the street is doused in blue shadow. In the summer, on the corner of the road, the old men play dominoes every afternoon. When the heat becomes too present, they abandon it in favour of the other side of the street, and put children’s stools on the pavement. There is a man I’ve seen for years who wanders around the neighbourhood in his retirement. I greet him when I walk to my Jammie. Murals adorn the walls of the houses. Free Palestine, they say. From Salt River to the Sea, Palestine will be free. Tourists follow these paintings in groups, with a tour guide there to explain the things that don’t really need to be said. “Five hundred Rand!” my family exclaims. “We can give these tours ourselves.”
When night falls, the shadows embrace the silhouettes of the car battery thieves and the solitary figures looking for money, leaning against the wall with the fiery bud of a cigarette to keep them company. The mattresses around the corner of the road provide the homeless with rest and the smell of urine. They disappear in the morning light, like some insidious sort of magic.
Every weekend, without fail, the student house to the left of us puts on their Bluetooth speaker. I know the ba-dum! of the connection as well as the creaks of my staircase now. Horses tied to carts traverse the streets. Fruit sellers know my mother’s face, and call her Ma-dame. The disarray of car parts on the roof across from mine still confuses me. The pigeons around us still probably call my roof their home. It’s loud, it’s brash. I often wonder if it’s just a city soundtrack or if my house’s defences have been breached. But when I hear the call to prayer anywhere in the world, I feel like I’m home.